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Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges’ attention by taking “massive open online courses” designed for older students.
遠在印度和蒙古的青少年申請人因參加“大型在線公開課”(mooc)而引起西方高校的注意。Mooc原本是為年齡較大的學生設計的。
Schoolchildren taking Mooc courses on their own initiative account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
哈佛大學和麻省理工學院(MIT)共同創辦的在線教育平臺edX擁有80萬名學生，其中自主參加Mooc課程的中學生約占5%。
Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX’s circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 – or “pi day”, as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.
17歲的阿莫爾•巴韋(Amol Bhave)來自印度賈巴爾普爾市。上周他獲悉，他在edX電路與電子學課程中的考試得分在前3%之列，因此被MIT錄取。他與英國《金融時報》記者在Skype上聊天時表示，他在3月14日國際圓周率日(pi day)這天收到了這條好消息。
“I am like the first person in my city to get into MIT ever so I have become sort of pretty famous,” Mr Bhave said.
巴韋說：“好像我是我們市有史以來第一位進入MIT的，所以我相當有名了。”
“I was so motivated by how we were taught [by edX] that I decided maybe I belong at MIT after all.”
“EdX授課方式大大地激發了我的積極性，我覺得我就是MIT的一份子。”
Mr Bhave came to the attention of MIT faculty members after joining two students he met in the course’s discussion forum to create a follow-up course. “I really felt that the quality of education online was far, far better than [my] school,” he said. “It opened doors to me for getting into colleges such as MIT which I could never even have dreamt of getting into from my town.”
巴韋與課程論壇上認識的兩名學生共同創建一項后續課程時引起了MIT教職員的注意。他表示：“我真心覺得在線教育的質量比我們學校好太多了。在線課程為進入MIT這樣的學校打開了大門，否則我做夢都不敢奢望從我們這樣的城市能有機會進入這種學校。”
In addition to the small but growing pool of precocious teenagers, edX president Anant Agarwal said about 45 per cent of Mooc students are college age and the remainder older “continuing learners”. He added that edX chose a non-profit model to help achieve its target of educating 1bn people around the world within 10 years.
EdX主席阿南特•阿加瓦爾(Anant Agarwal)表示，除了比例雖小但增長迅速的早慧少年，Mooc學生中有45%的人到了上大學的年齡，其他更加年長的是“繼續學習者”。他補充道，edX采用非盈利模式來實現在10年內教授10億人的目標。
Less than one-third of edX’s students come from the US, with the second-largest group from India. EdX, which has 55 staff and users in 192 countries, expects to reach 1m students by its first anniversary in May.
EdX學生中，不到三分之一來自美國，第二大群體來自印度。EdX擁有55名員工，用戶遍及192個國家，到今年5月成立一周年的時候，注冊學生預計將達100萬人。
Critics of Moocs point to the low percentage of students completing online courses. Of 155,000 who took edX’s first circuits and electronics course, about 26,000 were “active learners” who clicked on exercises and just 7,200 passed.
批評Mooc的人士指出，學生完成課程的比例很低。在15.5萬名參加edX初級電路與電子學課程的學生中，約有2.6萬人是“活躍學習者”，會點擊練習，其中只有7200人通過課程。
But Mr Bhave predicted that online education would have a significant impact in India and beyond . “Seeing experiments performed in front [of you] has another pleasure,” he said. “Also your degree at the end also has the name MIT on it. That is something.”
但巴韋預計，在線教育將在印度以及其他國家產生深遠影響。他表示：“親眼看到實驗在你眼皮底下進行也是一種樂趣。而且最后你拿到的學位證上還印有MIT名字。這很了不起。”
